‘I am going to work until God tells me not to’
Need or desire keeping record number of older workers on the job
ATLANTA — The American workforce is graying. Baby boomers are staying on their jobs longer and finding new work after retirement in record numbers. The surge in older workers can be attributed to multiple factors, such as the disappearance of company pensions, the increasing age to collect full Social Security and growing lifespans.
It will change the workforce and economy for decades to come.
The trillions of post-retirement dollars earned will circulate through cruise ship companies, restaurants and retailers. Less-affluent, still-working seniors are likely to use fewer government social benefits. And older workers will provide both a steady stream of labor in the tight market, as well as compete with younger workers.
Though many are happy to be still on the job, others are working because they have to.
LaVerne Gaither belongs to the former group and Janet Beebe to the latter.
The two share background stories of being cancer survivors. They work elbow to elbow when Gaither, who is a United Airlines international flight attendant, volunteers at the Peachtree City, Georgia, nonprofit that Beebe runs, the Breast Cancer Survivors’ Network.
Gaither can’t envision herself retired. Though she is celebrating her 40th year with United, she’s still regularly flying to destinations such as Europe and China.
For her, an active life of enjoyable work, helping others, travel, social activities — and the freedom that a full-time income imparts — is too good to give up.
“We are not that grandparent that wants to sit at home watching the grandchildren,” said Gaither, 65. “I will work until God tells me not to. He is going to have to give me
some kind of sign.”
Beebe, 70, loves her “fromthe-heart work” as the nonprofit’s paid chief executive officer, providing and coordinating services for poor cancer patients. But every morning when she wakes up, or when her knee that needs surgical replacement aches, she thinks about retiring.
She and her husband James’ dreams of calling it quits at 65 and going on an Alaskan cruise melted away 14 years ago, when he turned
58. James started showing signs of Parkinson’s disease and retired early as a sales manager for a large paper firm. Three years ago, she had to put him in a care facility that costs almost $6,000 a month.
“I am working because I have to,” Beebe said. “We are burning through our 401(k) and Social Security checks.”
Rising life expectancy
In 2000, about 1 in 10 Americans 65 years old to 74 years old worked. Today, it is about 1 in 4 and expected to grow to 1 in 3 in roughly six years. The total number of workers in that age group will have risen from 4.1 million in 2000 to more than 14 million in 2027, according to a 2018 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Among those 75 and older, the number of workforce participants will double from 1 in 10 to 1 in 5 by 2026.
The average life expectancy, which was 70.8 in 1970, now stands at 78.6.
The downside to a longer life is that people need to save more for retirement. If they haven’t saved, they must keep working. Health bills eventually come due, and they are more expensive than ever.
Fear of those expenses is pushing some boomers to stay on the job to keep company-sponsored health insurance. Though they qualify for Medicare at 65, any monthly premiums for additional coverage slice away at fixed incomes, and Medicare doesn’t cover the kind of help James Beebe needs.
Other boomers are healthy, but still need to work to stay financially afloat. Wallace Knox, 66, worked in construction and landscaping most of his life, jobs that left him with no pension and little opportunity to save.
He still works three hours a day, seven days a week, collecting grocery shopping carts for the Wayfield grocery store on Martin Luther King
Jr. Drive in Atlanta.
“If I had enough money, I would sit down every day,” Knox said while pulling blue shopping carts from the bed of his pickup. “I wouldn’t get up for anybody.”
In a 2016 poll by Boston University’s Center for Retirement Research, about half of older workers said they need extra income to maintain their lifestyles. Thirty years ago, about 1 in 3 needed it.
Geoff Sanzenbacher, the center’s director of research, said it’s more difficult to say how many must work just to keep some of life’s basics in place. Poverty rates for older Americans are hard to pin down because of difficulty in tracking benefits such as payments from 401(k)s. But the range of seniors in poverty is probably between 9 percent to 14 percent, he said.
The Social Security Administration estimated in its most recent count in 2014 that Social Security retirement provided 90 percent or more of income for about 21 percent of couples older than 65, and for about 43 percent for singles. This year, the average retirement check is $1,461 a month, or $17,532 yearly.
The age to collect a full amount of Social Security retirement is also rising, keeping many in the workforce longer.
And the Great Recession wiped out retirement nest eggs for some.